If and when you make it to your 30's, you will likely find yourself needing to come to grips with real life. Such as you find it.

This dawned on me at the ripe age of 27, and when I asked a 19 year old about this deadline recently he told me that it's still in force. 30 is the end.

After my edgy years with the Blame, after performing twice at C.B.G.B. when it had been abandoned by everyone but tourists, it occurred to me that songwriting might be a valid career path, even if rock stardom was not. And when there seemed to be no way to move forward with songwriting, with marriage and starting a family looking pretty good, I went back to school.

There was a lot of this reckoning going on at the time. There was a TV series about it called Thirty Something. A couple of movies, even, like The Big Chill. So of course us old-timers formed a band and named it Dark 30. Never say die!

But now there was no more pretending. We would be a bar band, and play rock and roll the way we liked it, as well as we could play it. We did that for around seven years, in the course of which me and the woman from Jacksonville got married, had a kid and bought a house. All the usual stuff.

All the usual stuff includes some of the unpleasant stuff, the coming-to-terms-with stuff that happens in your thirties, and of course, I wrote about these things.

Hamilton Park